An alumna of Clarion West Writer’s Workshop for science fiction and fantasy, I’ve written for markets like The New York Times and Time Out New York. Currently, I write about sci-fi for Blastr. I also edit the humor competition for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.

4/18/2012 @ 8:56AM462,261 views

5 Horrifying Facts You Didn't Know About the Space Shuttle

Yet another reason is that the equipment was so very old. Designed in the 1970s and completed in the 1980s, the Shuttle had some modifications over the years, but for the most part, it remained frozen in time. Watson explained.

“Over thirty years, some companies go out of business, or basically their entire business is that one component, which is being paid for purely by the government. So the cost goes up because they’re not selling to anyone else besides the government, and their entire assembly line to build that piece needs to be maintained by the government. These issues led to rising and rising costs.”

Famously, at one point, NASA had to find parts for the Shuttle–parts that no one else made anymore–on eBay.

On the other hand, the Soyuz, the vehicle of choice of the Russian Space Agency (RSA), is less expensive by an order of magnitude. So how much does it cost to launch?

Watson said, “That number has never been publicized by the RSA, but it’s rumored to be as low as $45 million. Of course, in accordance with supply & demand, they’re now selling seats for $63 million a piece: initially “tickets” were selling for around $20 million.

“But even if it cost [the RSA] $80 million to launch, it’s still significantly cheaper than Shuttle.

According to MSNBC, “Russia is now seen as having the world’s safest, most cost-effective human spaceflight system.”

It’s also—and the irony here is almost painful—the only one you can buy a seat on. This makes the Soyuz both the most capitalist and the least government-funded space transportation option.

3. It never went very high.

Watson said, “The public has this mental image of [the Shuttle] going somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, and the fact is, it’s not true.”

The Shuttle had an operational altitude of only 120 to 600 miles. However, the Shuttle’s trip to the International Space Station (ISS) was only a 200-250 mile journey… approximately the distance between NYC and Boston. The Shuttle also flew to the Hubble Telescope, which is maintained at an altitude of 350 miles, a little less than the distance from NYC to Norfolk, VA.

In case you don’t remember it from science class, the distance between the Earth to the Moon is 238,000 miles.

4. It never worked according to parameters.

Plans for the Space Shuttle were created in 1972 as a way to keep the cost of spaceflight down. (And see what happened there.) Each Shuttle was supposed to fly fifty missions per year…yet it averaged approximately four flights a year. And here’s a shout-out to the late space station Skylab, which disintegrated in Earth’s atmosphere in 1979 because the Shuttle wasn’t built in time to boost its orbit.

Each Shuttle was designed for only ten years of life. Keeping the Shuttle flying for twenty years past expiration date stifled creativity and innovation.

Just how bad was the Space Shuttle? Even former NASA administrator Michael Griffin called it “a mistake.”

5. It’s going to be replaced by something much better.

SpaceX was just given the go-ahead to launch its unmanned Dragon capsule to the ISS on April 30th after a recent successful test flight; SpaceX looks to be the first of many businesses vying for the “space” that NASA left when it stopped ferrying astronauts. Companies such as Blue Origin, as well as Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, Orbital Sciences, and even aerospace stalwart Boeing, are working hard to create a business model that will reduce the cost of spaceflight.

The result of that, according to Watson, “will be getting more people to orbit, more often, and for a far reduced price.”

Dragon and its commercial brethren are certainly feats of engineering. Despite that, the core difference between these vehicles and the Shuttle is not technical: it’s conceptual. What truly makes them different is that they are designed to be profitable commercial vehicles, built with commercially sourced components from a private enterprise supply chain and with paying customers. Including NASA.

Instead of building its own spacecraft, NASA will off-load the business of transit to and from space to the private sector, which can now do it better and cheaper, while the space agency can get back to doing what it does best—pushing the frontiers of science and the exploration of space.

Best of all, these new vehicles will eventually become cheaper through demand and competition, which means that I can expect to fly in space at some point in my lifetime. And so can you.

Not only that, they will be profitable and self-sustaining too. Just the thing that the US is meant to be good at. Now that’s a future of space to look forward to.

So thanks for the memories, Space Shuttle. I look forward to seeing you when I visit the Mercury capsule.

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Maybe I have a different take of the word “horrifying,” but I’m pretty horrified by a 30-year program that spent $192 billion (in 2010 dollars), flew only a fraction of its proposed missions, and failed to innovate.

She’s very much out of her depth here… the “failed to innovate” comment was especially ammusing. As you said; the entire concept was an innovation. Since the Shuttle also performed missions no other space craft could I would say “failed to innovate” is a gross mischaracterization of the entire program.

So, Carol is “pretty horrified by a 30-year program that spent $192 billion (in 2010 dollars)” — which is roughly $6.4 billion a year

However, she’s blissfully ignorant to the fact we also spent in one, SINGLE year (also in 2010 dollars) $632 billion on Military, $586 billion on Social Security, $394 billion on Medicare, $367 billion on Unemployment, $350 on non-Military Discretionary, $276 billion on Medicaid, $354 billion on the budget deficit and $243 billion in Interest on the National Debt.

Yep. Still ignorant of the fact that in 2010 dollars, that figure is roughly equivilent to what the Apollo program ran from 1961-1972 (1975 if you want to include the leftovers used for Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Program).

“Failed to innovate” is an unfair assessment. Innovation would have been born from subcontractors working with JPL or ARC or some other NASA group. The intent of the Shuttle was not to provide innovations.

There are so many other holes in your article that it seems like you wrote for the sake of trolling; that for all the successes that the Shuttle had over 30 years you summed it up with “mostly useless; too expensive”.

Carol: Not too innovative? Seriously? Show me ONE other space vehicle that can take 7 people into ORBIT, bring them back, then do it again. The same year. With tons of equipment. With a robotic arm to handle that equipment. That can dock with the ISS.

Name just one space vehicle that is today – 2012 – more innovative than the space shuttle in so many ways.

Not when it’s divided by 30 years down to $6.4 billion out of a multi-Trillion U.S. Budget and economy — especially when we’re spending 36 times that amount and STILL can’t solve our “social issues” after all these decades.

You and others are certainly doing a lot of whining for what amounts to $55-$60 out of your pocket when your annual double-mocha latte grande budgets are even larger.

“We could take the budget to ten times its size annually then and what you spend today would look cheap.”

Ten times would be decidely excessive when doubling down would do nicely. See Neil deGrasse Tyson’s recent comments:

What is horrifying is what any reasonably efficient/effective enterprise could have done with the 40 years and $500 billion spent on US manned space since Apollo…

It is horrifying that this taxpayer money and time was flushed down the big govt agency toilet, rather than producing affordable space vehicles, lunar colonies, mars missions, visits to asteroids… that that money was wasted on big govt pork, waste, rather than being invested in actual space technology, exploration, science.

I have read and re-read Carol’s post…where does she mention any of the programs you sited as to her blissful ignorance? Just because she remained on-topic doesn’t mean she doesn’t care or have an opinion. You should try to do the same…post on-topic. If you have issues with those problems you mentioned, find an article and lam-blast away.

Lets see anything built in 1980 be called innovative compared to something built today. Ever hear of the Straw Man technique? Its for use by people who do not want to incourage or support clear rational thinking.

NASA had numerous follow on vehicles planned. All were shot down over the years by Congress and several Presidents. Some may have even learned from the Shuttles mistakes and achieved the goal of launches in the Soyuz cost range. We’ll never know. The people who proposed those more innovative designs are no longer at NASA.

Nasa’s boondoggle, dead end Shuttle, promised by pork driven Nasa to a gullible Congress as a $7 million/flight ‘cheap, safe, reliable’ Nasa’s shuttle cost over $1.5 billion/flight, killed 2 crew, was years late with several multi-year service outages..

Nasa’s shuttle was the most dangerous, bankruptingly expensive, unreliable vehicle in space history…

Let me see; Goodyear’s spring-loaded tire , environmentally friendly lubricants including biodegradable ones, LED lights for medical/plant usage, insulating aerogels, a tiny fuel pump now used as a heart pump, hyperester netting, hand held cutter used as rescue equipment — a mini version of one NASA used to separate the solid booster rockets, advancements in digital cameras and video stablization, infrared cameras for firefighters, and countless medical advances. Let me not forget to mention smaller electronics, the hundreds or thousands of experiments performed, Hubble Space telescope, the ISS and spawning countless American Dreams.

Just because you don’t realize what the technology onboard the shuttle did for almost every part of your technological life does not mean it “failed to innovate” and wasted $192 billion dollars. And the reason it flew only a fraction of its proposed missions is because people like you voted to cut spending for NASA. With only 1 penny of every dollar of taxpayer money being spent on NASA, how can you even begin to fly all the missions you want to? This article is grossly misrepresenting information for the sake of making an opinionated statement. That is not journalism.

I don’t think a single dollar was wasted as it inspired young people worldwide to get into science, including people outside your country. Who in tern help improve technology and medicine. I do agree that the innovation stagnated, but i think this was largely to do with NASA being a goal orientated program, when the lofty goals stopped being set it stopped being cost effective.

Your 40% figure is misleading. Each shuttle was different than the last. The Shuttle program had 135 flights with two failures. 1.4% failure rate for launches. The Shuttle is a little different every time it hits the launch pad. It’s like if I modified my car every time I drove it. I’d probably be above the 1.5% mark in breakdowns.

You raise a good point. Because the Shuttle was modified for each flight, it never achieved the reliability and reusability that a truly reusable vehicle (a.k.a. RLV) would offer. That’s a whole other article, though.

Carol, I think you had the elements of a great article but didn’t need the “shock and awe” of wildly flawed statistics and headlines to make your case. It’s really not a “whole other article.” A case can be made that the Shuttle program was a terrible program by educating readers about why 1.5% is just too high, and what all these billions of dollars could have been used for.

It’s just completely flawed to draw readers in with a headline like this and see statistics that are so wildly misleading. I agree with the premise of the article that the program was a huge waste, but a “40% failure rate” is just incorrect. It is 1.5%. That takes up one sentence. How about doing the brave thing and correcting it?

A failure rate = # of failures/number of occurences * 100.

Otherwise, people might jump to conclusions like, Honda Accords are far more deadly than Ferraris, since the total number of deaths for all people who ever died in Honda Accords ever made vastly exceeds the deaths in Ferraris.

I believe you all seem to miss the point that the Space Shuttle was the Model T of reusable space craft. There is already a replacement for it, the X-37, which is the property of the Air Force, and, rendered the Shuttle obsolete as far as the Pentagon was concerned and hastened it’s demise.

The X-37 is automated, and, is small enough to be mated on top of the rocket, where the payload should be.

I guess what I object to most here is the complete absence of any credit given to the most ambitious and productive series of space missions to date. And the ignorance of what the Shuttle accomplished and the glorification of the Shuttles extremely limited replacement.

Archie, please educate us. What were the five most significant things accomplished that helped further humanity? And please leave out things like, “better spaceships.” My understanding is that very limited was accomplished- other than fixing the Hubble telescope- but I’m prepared to listen to the “productive” accomplishments.

Do you understand the definition of reliability and re-usability? Shuttle Discovery flew 39 missions over 27 years. Your statistics are significantly skewed as Craig pointed out.

Any vehicle that undergoes the rigorous conditions of spaceflight will always require constant maintenance, modifications and upgrades. I hope you do the same to your car, instead of just buying a new one when your radiator goes out.

You should really try to avoid the shock value in your “horrifying” article.

You’re comparing the Space Shuttle to the airline or automotive industries. This isn’t a valid comparison, because those were mass-produced vehicles. My stat was the percentage of vehicles built that ultimately failed. That is 40%.

The turbo-pumps, one of the most expensive pieces of hardware, was replaced after every other flight. The SRBs were disassembled after every flight, and then reassembled. Do you replace your transmission after every drive? Or take apart and put the engine back together?

Carol, your “stat” is not a “rate”. A rate is calculated by a number of failures/number of missions times 100. I think you got some bad info from the agency whose job it is to promote private space travel, and no editors bothered to think a little more deeply about what 40% meant and why it is meaningless. It just sounded good (and scary) to get a grabby headline.

Every vehicle will ultimately fail over time if it used enough, having a 100% failure rate, according to your definition. Don’t you think the Apollo spacecraft would have also failed at some point if used hundreds of times? If not, where is your evidence?

But your article strongly suggests that Apollo was a safer vehicle. Yet this “fact” is a junk statistic, because each Apollo vehicle only went once. The appropriate measure would be if Apollo and Space Shuttles went on an equal number of missions and we could compare failure rates per mission. We will never find out which one was safer.

It’s not about mass manufacturing or limited manufacturing.. it’s about a simple point about risk. The Shuttle had more data points, so we are better able to assess it.. the other space programs had 1 observation.

Do you have access to a comparable rate of failure for NASCAR or other automobile racers (please do include things like the electric cars and other concepts that are one-offs or extremely-limited production), or for one-off-built aircraft? The comparison in the article suggests that a 40% machine failure rate (as distinct from the ~1.5% use failure rate) is cause to not build something – and from a commercial viewpoint, you’re totally right: That’s not something you can sell to everyone with $X,000 dollars to spend. However, the Shuttle wasn’t built for commercial purpose, and falls under a different set of criteria. Just as no one would expect the Wright brothers’ plane to be much more then proof-of-concept, I consider the Shuttle to be amazingly comprehensive and deep proof-of-concept and exploratory work: We’ve shown there’s a lot that can be down in Low Earth Orbit and we’re certainly not out of things worth doing there.

Hmm, although a silly analogy, I would not want to be caught driving a 1981 Ford Mustang, even if everything from the engine to the paint job had been refurbished…& an LCD had been retrofitted into the display panel.

As a car collector, I would be especially sad if Ford stopped producing new models in 1981, declaring it had “perfected the car”…

This “horrifying” lack of progress sometimes manifests when an industry is not geared to encourage competition. While that may be an acceptable reality with some industries, America needs dynamic progress in space transportation cost and frequency. We can not continue to be satisfied with the design limits of 1970s.

The best chance for America to financially sustain a human space exploration program and eventually settle space, is for NASA to expand on programs like Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. Consistently encouraging what America does best — create new businesses and technologies for profit, under the pressure of healthy competition — is the most natural way to the stars.

Well what about the ISS, for example? The first large space station would not have been possible without the Shuttle and everything that has evolved as a result of the space station and the science conducted there.

I am sorry not to be an expert on the ISS, surely it is responsible for a huge amount of raw science going on.

Mir, was a pile of junk. It was an antiquated system launched all at once like Skylab. True, most any launch system can bring supplies to the station, any station. However, a space complex that keeps evolving and growing needs servicing that can not be maintained by a capsule. Did you ever see Cosmonauts attaching a new pod to Mir? Of course not. The Mir, and the Soviets, didn’t have the capability to do so.

The Shuttle was a huge advancement in aerospace technology. Once again to draw a financial comparison to two completely different systems that are incomparable. Mir, was a static station that never grew or evolved. Unless you consider the cosmonauts rigging the damn thing so it wouldn’t explode as evolving.

Would you compare the expense of a rowboat to a yacht? Are there costs differences? Does a yacht give you more than a rowboat?

Assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996, Mir was the world’s first modular space station. In comparison, the earlier Salyut and Skylab space stations were pretty much one-shot deals.

The first module of the Mir, known as the core module or base block, was launched in 1986, just a few months after the space shuttle Challenger tragedy. It was followed by six further modules, all launched by Proton rockets (with the exception of the docking module, brought up by the space shuttle). The complex was assembled via semi-automated docking of these modules to the base block’s multiple docking ports. Once completed, the Mir station consisted of seven pressurised modules and several unpressurised components.

Mir had a greater mass than that of any previous spacecraft, holding the record for the largest artificial satellite orbiting the Earth until its deorbit in March of 2001 — a record now surpassed by the International Space Station.

Carol – Name one other launch vehicle that is the least bit reusable. Name one other space vehicle that can land on a runway. Name one other space transportation system that can take 7 people into space along with a cargo hold of deliverables.

While it’s true my facts regarding the construction of Mir was off, my opinion of Mir was not.

From the beginning, Mir was frought with technical problems. The first thing our astronauts noticed about Mir was that the Cosmonauts were forced to run new connections for station components by running the wires straight through the safety hatches, making it impossible to close the hatch in the event of an emergency.

The author Carol seems to believe what the USSR would present to the world in terms of costs. If the costs the USSR presented were true, pertaining to defense and space exploration, the USSR would probably still be around.

It’s also true that Mir was originally designed to last for only five years and instead survived for 15 — a testiment to the tenacity and dedication of the USSR/Russian Federation/US teams that worked around the problems as the vehicle aged over time.

Valuable lessons were learned in the process and are being applied to the current ISS — just as lessons learned there will most likely be applied to follow-on successors like Robert Bigelow’s BA-330, Sundancer, Next-Generation Commercial Space Station and Space Complex Bravo.

That’s not actually even a close similarity Nathan. These aren’t cars coming off a line, where there may be 1000s of cars that are the same model. If you do not wish someone to manufacture stats (which she did not) than you shouldn’t do so yourself.